


You Have To Start Somewhere

by mickeymilkchild (kittleimp)



Category: Shameless (US)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Youtubers, Gen, Implied/Referenced Drug Use, Internalized Homophobia, The Ships Do Not Matter
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-04-29
Updated: 2015-05-11
Packaged: 2018-03-26 08:46:26
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 2
Words: 3,487
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/3844546
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/kittleimp/pseuds/mickeymilkchild
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Ian and Mickey may be famous on YouTube now, but they sure as hell didn't start out that way.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Mickey

**Author's Note:**

> This is the first part of a series of fics about Ian and Mickey as YouTube stars, based on [my tumblr post](http://mickeymilkchild.tumblr.com/post/117439341248/shameless-us-au-youtube-stars-i-missed-the).

Looking back, it is hard to believe that everything started with a stolen computer and an empty house.

Mickey, then seventeen and already exhausted with the idea of school, spent the first two hours of his Monday morning laying in bed and toying idly with a knife, wondering what to do with the laptop bag resting on his desk.

Sure, when he snatched it from some high school on North Side he was planning to make some fast cash in the pawn shop, but he needed the computer more than the cash. An accident involving his angry father and a poorly thrown can of beer resulted in the premature death of his own shitty laptop a few weeks before.

The idea came from a crumpled paper in the stolen bag’s pocket. Apparently the students in Mr. Hertfeld’s media and progress class had to create a video diary on YouTube for a total of sixty points. Mickey couldn’t help but scoff thinking about the stupid shit those rich idiots would talk about, as if their lives were actually something interesting. One hour in his life would be more interesting than the daily goings-on of any North Side asshole.

Why not give it a try?

It only took him three minutes to remember where everyone in his family was. Jamie and Tony were both out helping Terry with some issue involving drugs and money. They would stop by the Alibi after finishing up and be home after dark. Colin was out as well, probably fucking around with that chick he’d been with for a few weeks. Iggy was still in juvie.

Mandy was the only sibling that was a wild card. She was probably at school. Mickey had never figured out how to get by in the classroom, but Mandy kept moving up the grades, so obviously she was doing something right.

Then again, she might have skipped the day to pester her lust interest of the week. Actually, no. Mickey paused and thought through the long list of boys Mandy had recently taken an interest in and realized she hadn’t changed it up in a few weeks. Gallagher, then. The ginger one who was playing hard to get.

Either way, she wasn’t likely to show up until at least one. For the moment, he was alone in the house.

He chugged a beer from the fridge and considered what he would say. Which story would he start with? The story of how his mom OD’d on heroin when he was twelve, or the story about how his brother got locked up for beating a kid half to death? Those stories would be more interesting than anything the North Siders had. What they wouldn’t be was funny.

With his hair slicked back and the ratty shirt he’d been wearing for two days switched to a similarly tattered hand-me-down top, he sat down at his desk. A story from just the day before came to mind, so he opened up the laptop’s default camera program and pressed record.

After five seconds of silence, he hit stop and deleted the video.

“This is so fucking…” he muttered, running a hand through his hair. What was he supposed to start with? Only a fucking tool would start with their name or some shit, so that was out of the question.

Most people wouldn’t guess, but Mickey had always been pretty chatty by nature. Not endlessly chatty like the dumb shits in the school hallways, just with people he tried to consider friends or family. He hit record again and tried to pretend that he was just video calling with Mandy.

“Have you ever seen someone get tasered?” he asked the screen after a few seconds, as if it were actually listening. “Let me tell you, it’s pretty fucking funny. Those assholes never seem to see it coming. I mean, you’re running through the grocery store bare fucking naked with coke stuck in your chest hair, what the fuck do you think is going to happen?”

Before he could continue, he snorted and held a hand up. That wasn’t the best lead-in. He wanted to tell the story, not just ramble on about how funny it was to see some coked up asshole fall on his ass. After a steadying breath, he continues.

“Let me start again. So I was at Keane’s the other day, just trying to get some food for a party, you know, like hot dogs or some shit. I was just trying to figure out how many buns I needed when some idiot started screaming their head off in the next aisle.

“Now I’m not normally one to get involved in other people’s shit, but when like three other people started screaming too? Well, that’s about when I figured it wasn’t a private issue. So I looked around the corner and _bam!_ ” Mickey flicked his hands at the screen for emphasis and laughed.

“Dick, right in my face. Big, floppy, and fucking nasty. Attached to this skinny ass guy who had coke all over his hairy fucking chest. Naturally, he was in the fucking cereal aisle, so there was a whole family trying to decide whether to get Lucky Charms or something infinitely shittier when he showed up with his schlong dangling around.

“Now me, I’m not really down with seeing that shit, especially around food. I was weighing the benefits of knocking him on his ass myself against the possibility of touching his dick in the process. That’s something I really, _really_ did not want. Right as I decided to take my chances, the fucking cops showed up.”

Mickey leaned in and held up a finger, signalling a pause. The smile that had crept onto his face at some point during the story fell slightly. If he were actually talking to someone he knew then he wouldn’t have had to stop, but who knew who would see the video? The lucky viewer deserved to have a full picture.

“Now see, I don’t do well with cops. I mean, generally I don’t fuck with them and they don’t fuck with me, but I’ve dealt with plenty of them. We don’t get along. So this was probably the first time I have ever been thankful to see uniforms running over.

“Anyway, they ran in screaming, because cops always fucking yell, and grabbed at their stun guns. The guy just starts screaming back. I don’t mean the kind of scream someone makes when they’re startled, I mean just yelled and actually waved his hands around like he was in a cartoon. It was about there that someone jabbed him in the stomach with the stun gun.

“I guess this isn’t the first time this guy has pulled this shit, because when he was done twitching around he just sat down and tried to ask one of the cops about his wife. They dragged him out in handcuffs with a hat covering his dick. Poor cop probably burned it that night. After that, the rest of us just went about our business. That shit’s not that weird here, I guess.”

Mickey moved to hit the stop button, but hesitated before he could hit it. The video had been pretty fun and he wouldn’t mind doing another if he felt like it. It was certainly not the worst way to spend a morning. He shot the camera a smirk.

“So I guess if you liked that, then subscribe. Maybe I’ll do this again later.”

With that, he ended the video. There was more to the story, of course, like how he used the commotion to walk out of the store with enough hot dogs and buns to feed the whole party, plus a few bags of chips. Maybe one of the dumber brothers would have mentioned that, but he wasn’t stupid enough to admit to a crime on video.

Somehow, the hardest part of the whole thing was making his channel on YouTube. He wouldn’t put his last name on it, the last thing he needed was the page popping up in a google search for “Milkovich,” but that left him with fuck-all for ideas. In the end, he chose a stupid nickname that his brothers had come up with two summers ago.

At the time, he had been trying to hide.

Becky Hanson’s older brother wanted some weed. It was easily ninety five out with harsh sun and no breeze, so Mickey shouldn’t have been surprised when Jack showed up to buy in basketball shorts with his sweat-soaked shirt tossed over his shoulder. It should _not_ have knocked the breath out of him.

When he came into his hand fifteen minutes later, it was to the memory of the light, wispy hairs trailing down Jack’s toned stomach and dipping under his waistband.

Later that afternoon, Mickey suffered through the miserable heat and showed up at the Hansons’ door. Becky grinned when he held up a condom. His arched eyebrows and smirk were a mask that he wore well.

Mickey fucked her hard and fast, but every sound he made was for the boy in the bedroom across the hall. The marks he let her leave were penance for the thoughts that brought him to his orgasm.

As soon as Mickey got home, Colin had whistled and called out, “Hey, it’s Hickey Mickey!”

HickeyMickey, by some miracle, wasn’t taken by some other idiot with a camera. Within three minutes, Mickey had posted the video and closed the laptop so he could focus on some lunch.

It wasn’t until a week later that he took a look at the stats. His heart jumped in his chest when he saw the numbers. Three hundred views, almost two hundred thumbs up, and five comments. One of them simply said “lol,” but the other four all asked him to make another video. It was then that Mickey realized he might have found something good.


	2. Ian

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Coincidentally, Ian’s story also began with a stolen laptop.

Coincidentally, Ian’s story also began with a stolen laptop. The Gallaghers had a rotation for the use of their only laptop, which Fiona enforced militantly to avoid fights. Each kid got a day, then weekends were reserved for school work. Fridays were Carl’s time. The younger kid had fallen asleep on the couch almost half an hour earlier with the laptop running a playlist of prank videos on YouTube, leaving Ian with a tempting opportunity.

Stealing the laptop during someone else’s turn was a sure-fire way to lose your next turn, but Ian had been desperate to use the computer since he hung out at Mandy’s place on Tuesday. She had sat him down on the couch as usual and set her battered laptop on the coffee table.

“Check this out!” she said proudly, pulling up a YouTube page.

It was ever-so-creatively titled “Mandy’s Channel” and featured about five short videos. Each one of them looked to be a different prank pulled on her older brother, Mickey, who had slipped out of the house fifteen minutes before.. She clicked on the first and pointed to the number of views underneath the video.

“I got over a hundred views! There are some comments too, check it out!”

He watched as she scrolled down to the comments, listening to the Mickey in the video scream curses after a bucket of ice water was dumped on his head. There were two comments, both of them something about how funny the video was. Ian beamed. Mandy seemed so _proud_.

“That’s awesome, Mandy! Think you’re going to be one of those YouTube stars?” he asked.

She rolled her eyes, “No, the only ones who get famous like that are the vloggers and the gamers. I just take videos of Mickey acting like an idiot.”

“You could do it if you wanted to, I’m sure,” he said, trying to sound encouraging.

“Nah, you’ve got to be, like, really cute and funny to get famous,” she said. A smile lit up her face only a moment later. “You could do it, though!”

Ian shook his head and laughed it off. He was almost getting used to ignoring Mandy’s near-constant flirting. Sure, he hadn’t told her that he was gay, but if he dodged her for long enough she would have to take the hint eventually. If nothing else, he could tell her he was with someone. That wasn’t a lie. Kash was a great enough guy that the secrecy was worth every second.

Over the week, he continued to toy with the idea of vlogging. Mandy was a complete flirt, but she had a point about him being the type to get popular. If nothing else it would be a fun passtime. By the time Friday arrived, he had already filled a page in his notebook with ideas for videos and was itching to get his hands on a computer.

Ian hovered in the doorway of the living room and glanced to either side. With his younger brother out cold, he had a perfect opportunity to snatch the laptop without anyone noticing. No better time than the present. With soft steps, he stepped around and gathered the cord up. Carl didn’t stir at all as he snuck up the stairs.

Creating his channel took all of five minutes. All of the information was brainstormed in a notebook already, so all he he had to do was fill in the blanks. Designing the page could wait until his next turn on Monday. When he was done, he flipped through his notebook and opened the webcam software. Finally, he found the page with an outline for his first video.

When he saw himself appear on the screen, he frowned. His hair was shaves short enough that it didn’t need any adjustment, but his grey pajama shirt wasn’t exactly the most flattering thing in his wardrobe. Most of his clothes were dirty and wrinkled, but he managed to find a dark blue polo - one of Lip’s old shirts, as usual - that wasn’t too bad. Sure, he still looked like a slob from the South Side, but that was what he was, so he would have to deal.

He sat down again and hit record before he could let nerves get the better of him.

“Hey there, YouTube, my name is Ian,” he began, giving the camera a nervous smile. “I’m going to start posting videos here, so I thought I should introduce myself. Then I thought that you probably don’t care. Nobody goes onto a channel like mine to hear the details of some kid’s shitty childhood; you want something that’s actually entertaining. I think I can do that.”

Ian glanced to his notebook and moved on. The messy list scrawled onto the page was far from a script, but it served to keep him on track when he started wandering.

“Now, the first thing you’ve got to know is that I live in a shitty neighborhood. I mean _really_ shitty. Drugs, guns, thirteen year olds getting knocked up, that kind of thing. I try to stay away from the worst of it, but that's not because I’m better than anyone else here or anything. I’ve just got other priorities.”

He gave a shrug, deciding not to go too far into those priorities in the first video. Plus, dreams of being an officer only accounted for so much. Truthfully, he _was_ better than a lot of the people on his block, but that was just a matter of having a basic set of morals and a semi-decent personality.

For example, the Milkovich brothers. They were all just born and bred assholes with a moral code that was limited to their family. Plus, only Mandy ever bothered to go to school, so they were almost all as dumb as nails. Mickey, the one who was Lip’s age, was supposed to be in Ian’s grade now - if he ever showed up.

“In a neighborhood like this one, you get some weird sorts. There’s one family a few blocks away with a girl who is a few years older. Basically, I’d never gotten a hummer from a girl, so my older brother took me over to her place.

“Her mother is... well, she has some type of phobia, so we had to take our shoes off and leave them outside. That’s important for later.

“For some reason, she had to do it at the kitchen table. I guess we were pretending to have a study group or something, but her mom was in the kitchen and the tablecloth didn’t quite reach the floor. Then, of course, my brother is sitting across from me watching me get blown. Talk about weird.”

Honestly, that had been the most uncomfortable part of the situation. Ian hadn’t been all that excited to get a blowjob from Karen, but that was nothing compared to the weight of his brother’s stare. Like he had to watch and see if Ian was really gay.

“So this girl is under the table, trying to do... that. I was watching her mom and my brother was watching me. Then her _dad_ walks into the kitchen. Now, I wasn’t really enjoying myself before, but that killed any chance I had of getting hard.

“The guy's a weirdo. Super religious to completely obsessed with clowns. It’s creepy. He’s gathering his things for work and the girl just keeps going at it, generally being unsuccessful, but somehow she’s not making any noise. Just when we were almost in the clear, he knocks and apple onto the floor.

“My brother’s pretty smart, but even he couldn’t find a way to explain why the girl was under the table. On her knees. With my pants unzipped. Her dad figured it out pretty fast and then he _flipped the fucking table_.”

Ian laughed and shook his head, grinning widely. The situation was not even close to funny in the moment, but thinking back, he could feel more laughter building up in his chest. He leaned forward and took a breath to calm himself.

“My brother and I bolted, of course, but the front door was locked, so I ran for the back door instead. Except when I got out of the house, he was nowhere to be found. I thought he must be a goner.

“Now, remember our shoes? Still on the porch. I had to run over there, barefoot and with my pants still undone, to grab both pairs. Suddenly, I hear someone yell from above me. When I look up, my brother is falling from the second story window, so I figure the idiot must have taken the stairs to the second floor. He sprains his ankle. Of course.”

He snorts and rolls his eyes. Ian was the one who could have managed the jump. He wasn’t perfect at it yet, but he had learned how to roll after a jump a few weeks before that in ROTC. Lip looked like a flightless bird in comparison.

“We had to run all the way home from there. My older sister knows a nurse, so we got his ankle patched up and gave them some complete shit story about the L doors closing on him when he tried to hold them for an old lady. Nobody believed it, but they didn’t make us tell them what happened.”

Ian leaned back and sighed. The story was a lot funnier in retrospect. He was thankful for the experience, in a way, because what fun would life be if they didn’t have memories like that? Sure, Lip only got rid of the limp a few days before, but it was _funny_.

“Thing is, that’s how life goes for us around here. This week’s lesson is to never let a girl blow you under the kitchen table. Next week, I’ll tell you a story about my Little League team and some kid’s piss. Until then, be careful not to jump out of any windows.”

Ian tossed a smirk at the camera and then pressed the button to stop recording. The video only took a few minutes to upload. He closed the browser window then he was scurrying down the stairs again, trying not to wake his brother.

Carl was still flopped on the couch and snoring softly. Running on some sort of excited high, Ian plugged the laptop in and set it back on the table. He opened the page that Carl had been on before and shook his brother awake.

“Mh...?” Carl groaned, blinking slowly.

“You fell asleep watching videos,” Ian said. “Fiona’s gonna be pissed if you don’t fold the laundry.”

Carl cursed and jumped up, racing off to the kitchen. Ian smiled after him for a moment before climbing the stairs again to do his homework. When he got his official turn with the computer a few days later, he already had well over three hundred views. He recorded three more videos that day, flying on an excited high the whole time.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thank you for reading! I'm hoping to write some more of this at some point and flesh out the universe a bit more. If there's anything that you want to see, feel free to leave a comment here or [shoot me an ask](http://mickeymilkchild.tumblr.com/ask)!

**Author's Note:**

> Thank you for reading! As always, comments and kudos are much appreciated, but never necessary.
> 
> Want to chat? Have a suggestion or fic request? Want to see a lot of Shameless stuff in one spot? Visit my Shameless blog, [mickeymilkchild](http://mickeymilkchild.tumblr.com)!


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